Science > Chemistry Archives - Page 2 of 8

Simone Courvoisier

Head of pharmacology at Rhône Poulenc in the 1950s

After attending Harvard Medical School, Nancy Chang’s career trajectory led her to cofound Tanox (now part of Genentech), a company that sought remedies for asthma and allergies through genetic engineering.

Dr Ruth Erica Benesch

Reinhold and Ruth Erica Benesch made a key discovery that helped explain how hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells, carries oxygen from the lungs to all the cells in the body.

Dr Marie Maynard Daly

Overcoming the dual hurdles of racial and gender bias, Marie Maynard Daly conducted important studies on cholesterol, sugars, and proteins. In addition to her research, she was committed to developing programs to increase the enrollment of minority students in medical school and graduate science programs.

Kathryn Hach-Darrow

Hach-Darrow’s Hach Chemical ensured that clean water flows from household taps and everywhere that water quality is an issue.

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

With just two employees, a master brewer’s certificate, and her father’s blessing, Mazumdar-Shaw began a business specializing in industrial enzymes for food and textile makers that now reaches around the globe.

Uma Chowdhury

An ambitious teenaged Uma Chowdhry (1947–2024) left her home in India to study physics and engineering in the United States. But after falling in love with chemistry, particularly materials science, the study of solids at the molecular level, Chowdhry decided to work in industrial research.

Dr Anna Harrison

In 1978, more than 100 years after its founding, the American Chemical Society (ACS), one of the world’s largest scientific organizations, elected a woman as its leader for the very first time. Anna Jane Harrison had served as a chemistry professor at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts since 1945.

Dr Darleane C Hoffman

The heavy elements, which include plutonium, are hard to produce and exist only briefly, yet one woman has dedicated her career to capturing and analyzing them, making important discoveries about the nature of nuclear fission.